SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines are online services that allow users to scan the contents
of the Internet to find Web sites or specific information of interest to
them. A user inputs a search term, and the search engine attempts to match
this term to categories or keywords in its catalog of World Wide Web
sites. The search engine then generates a list of sites that match the
search criteria, ranked in order of relevance. Search engines help
organize the more than two billion pages of information on the World Wide
Web and make them accessible to Internet users.

Search engines are the primary method Internet surfers use to locate
information on the Web. In fact, Karl Greenberg noted in
Brandweek
that 85 percent of Internet surfers use search engines to locate
information online. Search engines generate the largest percentage of new
traffic to Web pages, followed by links from other sites, printed media,
and word of mouth. For this reason, small businesses hoping to establish a
presence on the Internet should make sure their Web sites are listed with
a number of search engines.

Search engines "catalog and list your Web site information so that
when someone using the Internet searches for information pertaining to
products or services that you sell, your potential customer locates your
site," Steffano Korper and Juanita Ellis wrote in
The E-Commerce Book.
"Search engines and directories function as listings of your
site's theme and content, similar in function to a phone directory
advertisement."

HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK

There are thousands of different search engines to help people navigate
the Internet. These include major commercial search engines—like
Yahoo!, Lycos, AltaVista, and Excite—as well as many smaller,
industry-specific directories. There are even metasearchers, which work by
querying a number of other search engines and processing the results. Many
of the major search engines are created through an automated process in
which a program called a spider "crawls" across the Web to
gather information about existing sites. The spider captures this basic
information and organizes its findings into categorizes, which are then
used to generate search results for users. Small businesses hoping to list
an existing Web site with a major search engine may find that the process
has already been completed for them by an automated spider.

The largest and most popular search site, Yahoo!, is an exception to this
rule. The Yahoo! listings are prepared by real people who actually look at
each Web site, analyze its contents, and assign it to various
classifications. Like most other commercial search engines, Yahoo!
routinely seeks out new Web sites to include in its listings. However,
small business owners may wish to change or add to the information that
has been gathered about their sites. Many of the smaller directories are
compiled using data submitted by individuals and businesses who want their
site to be listed. Web page designers submit a form describing their
sites, including keywords to describe the contents, in order to get a
listing.

When a small business's potential customers use a search engine to
scan the Internet for a particular type of information, they receive a
list of matching Web sites ranked by relevance. The various search engines
use different criteria to determine relevance. For example, Excite uses
the number of links pointing to a particular site as a gauge of its
popularity and ranks those sites higher. But regardless of the criteria
used, the main idea of relevance rankings is to inform users how closely
the contents of each site match their search criteria. As Vince Emery
noted in
How to Grow Your Business on the Internet,
search engines generally rank Web sites higher if the keywords appear in
the title of the page, as a headline in the body text, in the first 100 to
200 words of body text, or in the site's domain name. Another
factor determining relevance rankings is the search term density, or how
often the keywords appear in relation to other text on the Web site.

Since Web surfers generally have neither the time nor the inclination to
examine hundreds of sites, small businesses need to achieve a high
relevance ranking in order to attract visitors to their Web sites.
"Your goal with search engines is not just to have a listing in a
database," Emery wrote. "You need to rank in the first 50
listings returned, or even better, the first 25."

"No company that wants to thrive on the Web can do so without a top
ranking on the major search engines," Fredrick Marckini, founder of
search engine positioning firm iProspect, told Greenberg. "You can
spend a million or two on a Web site, but if you don't do the
things you need to do to make it found in the major search engines in the
top 30 matches, your million-dollar Web site is a billboard in the
woods."

There are a few steps you can take while designing or registering your Web
site to improve the odds of it appearing near the top of the list. Most
important among these are making sure keywords appear early and often, and
following the registration process for each search engine carefully. But
experts caution against trying to trick the search engines into ranking
your Web page highly. Known as "search engine spamming,"
this practice is frowned upon and may cause your site to be rejected by
some of the major search engines. The methods considered spamming include
repeating a keyword multiple times on a Web page (for example, printing
the word over and over in colored type that is invisible against the
background of the page) and duplicating the same Web page with several
different domain names in order to get multiple listings.

Korper and Ellis recommend that small business owners register their Web
sites with a number of major search engines and directories. It may make
sense to begin this process with the search engines that generate the most
traffic, such as Yahoo!, Excite, and AltaVista, but it is also important
to include smaller directories that may be popular within a specific
industry. The registration process generally includes
checking to see if your site is already listed, making any necessary
changes to the automatically generated listing, finding out how the search
engine organizes its listings, using this information to specify
appropriate categories and keywords for your site, and then making sure
that the keywords are placed in prominent positions on your site.

Several commercial services exist to help businesses register sites with
search engines. Many of these services simplify the process by listing a
Web site with a number of search engines at once. For example, Submit-It
allows you to post the details of a Web site to 20 different directories
from one central location. There are also search engine optimization firms
whose purpose is to make Web pages more relevant in search engine results.
For up-to-date information about search engines and directory
listings—as well as tips on achieving high relevance rankings and
links to online magazine articles—see
www.searchenginewatch.com
.